Every mother knows best, but Patricia Marx's knows better. Having never been able to shake her mother's one-line witticisms from her head, the New Yorker writer and Saturday Night Live alum enlisted cartoonist Roz Chast to illustrate them. As Marx says in her introduction, "My mother is a wellspring of certainty about what you should do, say, wear, and believe," and though her advice may be unmercifully blunt, "there is a lot to be said for knowing you are not being lied to." Here then are the rules, guidelines, principles, precepts, decrees, no-nos, yes-yeses, and arbitrary judgments of Patty's Mother.